RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s a tragic fact that Hamas’ attack that killed hundreds last weekend was a deadly salvo against the very existence of the Jewish state of Israel. But it was also an attack on the West’s weaklings who have once again enabled terrorism. And, sadly, that includes the U.S.

It was no accident that Hamas used a “Festival for Peace” concert near Gaza as an offensive on the very existence of the multi-ethnic, democratic state of Israel. Those attending no doubt thought their good intentions and good wishes for peace would be a shield against such atrocities.

Sadly, terrorists saw this as vulnerability, and took advantage. But it wasn’t just the concert that tempted them.

No, it was weakness among the political left in Israel, which seems to believe that calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “fascist” and craven acquiescence to terrorists will buy peace, and also among leaders in Europe, who somehow imagine that terrorist groups in the West Bank and Gaza are the moral equivalents of Israel.

Then there’s the U.S., perhaps worst of all.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been pathetically obeisant toward both the regimes that support terrorism, in particular Iran, and toward Hamas and other terrorist groups.

In this case, Hamas sized up its opposition, like any bully, and saw only spinelessness and stupidity. So it acted with help from others in the region, including and especially Iran.

We’ll see plenty of candlelight vigils and prayers for the dead and the dozens of people (including possibly some Americans) now held hostage by terrorists who think nothing of torturing or murdering other human beings in support of their own hateful, extreme beliefs.

But let’s remember one thing: Our government has encouraged this.

Just look at the U.S. State Department’s pathetic, morally equivalent response: “We urged all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

Really? As more than one commentator has noted, this is Israel’s Pearl Harbor, its 9/11. Israel has just declared war, and rightly so. And Israel has no choice but to wage war, since its very existence depends on ending the threat. Imagine if the U.S. had done nothing after Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

Make no mistake. Those who perpetrated these war crimes see us as cowards. Watching in recent years as our military rolled out woke DEI programs, as we abandoned our allies in Afghanistan to the terrorist Taliban, and as our president appeased terrorist nations and groups with billions of dollars in aid, what should they have to fear from us? More money?

Another question: After our inglorious exit from Afghanistan, did some of the massive number of arms used in the Hamas attack come from the billions of dollars of weapons left behind when we departed that tragic country, which is now in the hands of the terrorist Taliban?

For those who thought Biden’s “deal” to give $6 billion back to Iran in exchange for a handful of hostages was a nothingburger or even a good idea, guess what? Terrorists learned from this that we have a very low pain threshold, and will act accordingly.

We also find ourselves wondering about the recent news of Biden’s national security staff being penetrated with Iranian agents, yet another in a long series of Biden scandals. Did these assets pass privileged information from the highest levels of U.S. policymaking to Iran’s regime, telling the mullahs that we might talk tough, but in the end would do nothing?

Does anyone think that some of the $6 billion released to Iran, which applauded Hamas’ savage attack, and the billions of dollars in “humanitarian aid” we handed to the corrupt terrorist kleptocrats of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestine Liberation Army, isn’t a funding windfall for Hamas and other terrorist groups?

Furthermore, have our intelligence community and military establishment, both of which appeared to have no inkling of an attack, become too busy with being woke and spying on Trump supporters and other law-abiding U.S. citizens to do their actual job?

Undercutting Israel while appeasing terrorists and their supporters in the Mideast didn’t start with Biden. It’s been a common feature of leftist Democrat policymaking going back decades, starting with Jimmy Carter and running all the way to Barack Obama.

Biden is just another link in that chain.

As historian Victor Davis Hanson put it, “there was a general Hamas and Iranian perception that the Biden administration had resumed the discredited Obama madness of empowering Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. This discredited agenda was to ‘balance’ the power of Israel and the moderate Arab Gulf governments to achieve ‘creative tension,’ exacerbated by Biden’s loathing of the government of Benjamín Netanyahu (who has been snubbed by Biden and never invited for an official visit).”

There’s an old saying that remains as true today as ever: “Weakness begets war.” America’s growing global retreat, and its willingness to appease terrorists and dictators, will only return more of the same.

One other observation: Israel is our one true ally in the Mideast. Yet, Biden talks about an “integrated Mideast,” as if that mess of nondemocratic, unstable nations would somehow, someday join together under a benign Iran. It’s a foolish fantasy.

So Israel might have to wait out the current U.S. administration, and hope for a better one after 2024. In the meantime, it has its own self-reckoning to do.

As Liel Leibovitz of Tablet Magazine wrote:

It doesn’t matter what words Biden says today. When you champion Iran; when you send it and its proxies money; when you reward Palestinian violence; when you go out of your way to portray Bibi as a dangerous fascist; when you finance and champion his opponents, contributing to further instability and unrest; when you hand over U.S. intelligence keys to Iranian agents; when you have your spokespeople declare it ‘disinformation‘ for people to connect obvious dots; when you do all of this, you know what is going to happen. You mean for it to happen.

With our ally Israel at war today, we can only hope the conflict is brief and settled in Israel’s favor with minimal bloodshed. In the meantime, U.S. weakness and overtly anti-Israel policy is a main cause of this nightmare and is yet another reason for Americans to think seriously about how they vote in 2024.